Education or the dissemination of knowledge is a cause that I’m very passionate about. As the world becomes smaller, my experience and observations reveal it is education that makes the difference between the opportunities to which one is exposed. In today’s day and age, we have the ability to distribute this knowledge and therefore power to as many people as possible through various technological advances – in the form of allowing an accessible platform for the students of the world as well as being able to culminate the global teaching expertise and knowledge. Khan Academy is one success story in this arena. Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, started with a small library of videos to help his cousins understand certain Math concepts, and grew as he realized that his YouTube videos were being watched all over the world with requests for more.
In its current operation, the dissemination of knowledge needs a number of things to be successful. There are infrastructure costs that need to be considered, that of a building or a facility that can serve as a classroom. There are learning materials that are required – in the form of chalkboard or notebooks, and ways for the learning to be reinforced for the children. Most important, are the teachers. Qualified teachers who are willing to spend their time teaching and enough teachers for the masses of the children that are learning. The incorrect ratio can be almost as ineffective as having no teachers. Lastly, for all stakeholders involved schooling requires a certain time commitment, where those who are in the most dire need of the education are sometimes the most unable to commit this time. They are needed to work as breadwinners for the family during the day, and with the future of their family on the line their education falls to the wayside. There are no alternatives in these places for these children.
The benefit of education is hard to quantify and the positive effects hard to isolate to access to opportunity. However, in many countries and areas the literacy rate can be a direct correlation to the crime rate. So in the larger sense, the society as a whole is a large stakeholder. Politicians are in fact, one of the stakeholders in education. In the western world, there are various educational policies that politicians use to stand on. They can be one of the forces that enable innovations such as Khan Academy in the way of regulations and the certifications that can be provided in order to legitimize the institutions that are trying to change the infrastructure investment. The other obvious stakeholders are the students of the world who are looking to gain the skills and the credibility that education allows in order to further their ambitions, and the teachers who are willing to use any means possible in order to cultivate a new generation.
The Khan Academy is an innovation in this arena that has since seen a lot of success. It has expanded into more than just YouTube videos for the subjects that are taught in school. Students and teachers are able to take advantage of the knowledge that other people have gathered all over the world. There is the ability to tailor the learning to the students where the teachers can act as aids. They can adjust the lessons to the abilities of the students, so that they don’t let those who are excelling get bored and lose interest, and they don’t let those who are falling behind get frustrated and lose interest. They also have metrics which allow the students to track their progress and also allow the innovation to measure the impact that they’re having on the students’ lives.
Why is this Business Model Innovation so beneficial to the arena? First, as mentioned earlier, teachers can focus on the needs of the students. There is no particular need for the infrastructure investment such as buildings for schools and desks and chalkboards. There is also no necessity for the numbers of teachers that were required earlier. In this case one teacher can serve millions of children, and those around need not have a teaching degree but can act as support. The “lessons on demand” also alleviate the timing and the scheduling concerns that were present earlier. Students can bend the lessons to their schedule, so that they are no longer required to choose between serving their family and their future. The one drawback of this innovation is that the reach of this technology is contingent on the access to internet and devices that allow this connection. While in preexisting schooling this may not be an issue, the rural areas where this technology is needed this can prove a challenge.
This technology has allowed the presence of “new schools” – where the students are turning to their laptops for concepts that they want to learn. Not only are those who didn’t have access to education before using this technology, reinforcing the skills that they have learnt in school has become a common use for Khan Academy. As time goes on Khan Academy has progressed as a tool for teachers in their classroom – used to introduce concepts in a fun manner rather than using the age old whiteboard to teach lessons.
Khan Academy presents an opportunity for the world to gather to work on a cause that is important for closing poverty gaps, lowering crime rates and providing opportunities. Following its success, organizations such as OpenCurriculum have come up – using crowdsourcing to create curriculums that are relevant for the world – and closing the gaps between countries to use it as a uniting force which may allow us as a race to work together on issues facing the planet – rather than spending time trying to move out of our silos.